Join me for a walk in my secret bluebell woods. The beech nuts are falling at the moment, and a walk beneath the trees is punctuated by the soft thud of the empty shells hitting the woodland floor.

In ancient Japan, the calendar year was divided up into 72 “microseasons” adapted for Japan from the Chinese calendar. These mini seasons, each 4 to 6 days long, describe the blooming of a plant, the migration of birds, weather patterns and the ebb and flow of time from the perspective of the physical environment.

I love this way of seeing the world, I think it is really beautiful. I love watching the seasons change around me and so, inspired by the ancient Japanese concept of microseasons, I have decided to start my own microseasons project. Based in Birmingham, a post-industrial city in England, I am documenting the seasons as they come and go around me in the city. From walks in the woods, to watching ducklings learn to swim on the lakes and canals, to flowers blooming and fading, the first frosts, the mist and fog of November, to rebirth in the spring.

I have created a playlist here on YouTube so if you would like to see more of my microseasons project, click through to my channel bio to find the playlist, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you can follow along as I make and share the videos here on my channel.

This is the second part of my two part series on vegan summer evening meals. In the first part I shared what we typically buy at the vegetable market during the spring and summer months. I have filmed a week's worth of home cooked evening meals.

These meals are the sort of thing that we cook and eat during the week, including quick meals we throw together when we're short on time or motivation. Some of them take longer to prepare than others, but they are all quite easy and straightforward things to make.

For transparency, the thumbnail for this video is from the following week's market shop, but contains very similar vegetables to what I cooked with this week with the addition of sweetcorn, courgettes and pears.

Watch the first part for Saturday to Monday's meals here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWLrhTO266o

Here are some video chapters for part two:

00:45 Boiled new potatoes with mint, hummus, and green beans with garlic.

01:46 Baked aubergines with a yoghurt, tahini, garlic and pomegranate sauce, served with pan fried green beans and oven baked crispy tofu.

05:16 Bulgur salad with pan fried fennel. Served with a chickpea, orange and griddled aubergine salad.

13:44 Roast vegetables with beetroot fritters, served with hummus.

Join me for a walk around Cambridge University Botanic Garden in Cambridge, England. Last week, my husband and I made a daytrip to Cambridge to visit the botanic garden. The fruit trees are in blossom and we have been enjoying some lovely warm weather recently. We made a picnic and ate lunch beneath the redwoods before exploring the glasshouses and mature trees throughout the grounds of the botanic garden.

We were lucky enough to witness the university's "Strongylodon Macrobotrys" in full bloom!

Join me in the kitchen as I make damson sorbet with damsons I foraged locally. It's an ASMR video, no talking, and no music, I hope you find it relaxing. The recipe is at the bottom of this box.

I recently picked some damsons in the community orchard which runs alongside the canal from Wolverhampton in the Black Country, through Birmingham, and down as far as Worcester. The community orchard is a project which I am really excited about, and which has seen hundreds of fruit trees planted alongside the canal and in what are known as "pocket orchards" in fields and meadows alongside the canal network. This is the first year that the damson yield has been really good, and I was so excited to forage some damsons.

Damsons are really common in the UK, but if you can't find them where you live, you can follow the same recipe with other stone fruits. You could make sorbet with apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, or any other stone or soft fruit that you can think of. Sweeter fruits and very ripe fruits need less sugar than unripe or bitter fruits, but the recipe is very flexible and it's hard to go wrong.

My recipe for damson sorbet:

200g plain white sugar
300ml water
500g damsons (with the stones in)

Place the whole fruit, sugar and water in a pan and cook for ten minutes on a low heat. Once the damsons or plums have softened and fallen apart, remove from the heat and press the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the skins and stones.

Leave the fruit and syrup mixture to cool to room temperature. You can speed this process up by placing the bowl containing your fruit mixture in a second bowl containing cold water or ice cubes. Place the fruit mixture in the fridge for 1 hour once it has reached room temperature.

Transfer the fruit mixture to an insulated freezer bowl, icecream machine, or place it in a second bowl which is filled with ice cubes. Whisk the fruit mixture every 30 minutes until it has reached a soft serve consistency. This will take 2 hours if you are using an insulated freezer bowl designed for an icecream machine, or longer if you are just using a regular container in your freezer. Whisking is essential, because it breaks up the ice crystals and helps create a creamy texture for your sorbet or icecream.

The sorbet can be served immediately once it has reached a soft serve consistency, or transferred from the freezer bowl to a regular container and kept in the freezer until you would like to serve it. If you are using an insulated bowl designed for an icecream machine, don't leave the mixture in the bowl in the freezer overnight, because it will harden to a consistency which is almost impossible to scoop. This is why I transferred my sorbet from the insulated bowl to a plain container before placing it back in the freezer to set.

I bought an insulated freezer bowl rather than an icecream machine, as an icecream machine is bulky and I don't have space for it in my kitchen cabinets. The insulated bowl has a smaller footprint and can be kept in the freezer at all times, whereas an electric icecream machine with a plug needs to be kept in a cabinet or on the counter. Since I already have a whisk, I didn't see the point of buying a full icecream machine and just bought an insulated bowl. Many brands of icecream machine have the option to buy a secondary or replacement bowl. You don't need to buy the actual machine if you don't want or need to! Electric appliances can go wrong, but an insulated bowl will last a lifetime.

Today I am making cold process soap inspired by the traditional recipe for Marseille soap. Marseille soap, made in the southern French city since the 17th century, is a hard soap made with vegetable oil. It typically contains 72% olive oil, and the remainder of the soap is made with coconut oil and palm oil. The soap is traditionally coloured with clay but unperfumed, and it is used for many different purposes including for washing dishes and laundry.

The soap I am making in this video contains 70% olive and 30% coconut oil as I wanted to make sure that it was free from palm oil for environmental reasons. I was inspired by Marseille soap and wanted to create a soap which is as similar as possible to the traditional French soap. I have coloured my soap with French green clay, and in place of the water content I chose to use an elderflower infusion.

The recipe, created with the help of a lye checker, is as follows:

125g lye (sodium hydroxide)
285g elderflower infusion OR plain water
630g ordinary supermarket value olive oil (not EV or organic)
270g coconut oil

Superfat content: 5%

Safety warning:

Before making cold process soap for the first time, make sure that you are aware of best practice for handling lye. Rubber gloves and long sleeves are essential to prevent caustic burns to your skin.

ALWAYS add the lye to the water and NEVER the other way around. Add the lye slowly, and make sure to stir the mixture slowly until it has fully dissolved.

ALWAYS check your recipe against a lye calculator to ensure that the recipe will produce soap which has a skin safe pH value.